The following facts come from a variety of sources and are meant as a timeline to present the facts of what was clearly one of the great betrayals of modern times.

Few fit the character of villain and conman quite the way John Boyden does when it comes to mining and deceit. John Boyden was a pillar of Utah Democratic politics for many years. He was both a friend of Utah governors and of presidents. He twice sought Utah’s Democratic nomination for governor. He was a prominent Salt Lake City lawyer, who grew up a devout Mormon (ironically in a town named Coalville, Utah).

In 1947, Norman Littell of Arlington, Virginia, and John Boyden of Salt lake City, Utah, each applied for the combined post of general council and claims attorney for the Navajo Tribe. After much deliberation, the tribal council voted to reject Boyden and engage the services of Littell & Associates. Boyden was not pleased by the outcome and made sure he did not fail with the Hopi.

By 1943, the federal government no longer recognized the true Hopi Council, because Hopi traditionalists refused to recognize it. In order for Boyden to legitimize himself as the Hopi attorney, he made agreements with the leaders of seven of the twelve Hopi villages along with the unofficial Hopi Council.

In 1949, the Hopi religious leaders known as the Kikmongwi pleaded with President Harry Truman to prevent mining on their lands. The president ignored them.

Boyden was first hired by an unofficial group, which called itself the Hopi Tribal Council in 1950, to represent the tribe before the Indian Claims Commission. This commission was created to determine compensation for tribes whose lands were seized by the United States.

For Boyden, such work was a bonanza—he would earn a $500,000 fee or 10 percent of the government’s $5 million settlement with the Hopi for the loss of four million acres. This was roughly $1.25 per acre.

Boyden then moved to get the Hopi villages to hire him as general counsel to negotiate with oil companies interested in leasing parts of the reservation. The local Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) recommended rejecting the contract because it would legitimize a renegade tribal council without the consent of the Hopi people. Boyden went over the head of the local representative and won approval from Department of Interior officials eager to see the lands leased for oil and minerals. The BIA memorandum of the time documents Boyden saying, “Remuneration for his services will depend largely on working out solutions to many of the Hopi’s problems to such a point that oil leases will provide funds.”

By 1951, there was coal fever in the region. The Hopi did not have a government that could sign leases, as they practiced their traditional self-government and their religion forbade coal mining.

By 1952, Boyden filed a petition with the Secretary of Interior asking that a former solicitor’s opinion stating that there were co-existing mineral rights with the Navajo be reconsidered and that the Hopi be granted full rights. While this was occurring, the Arizona School of the Mines and the BIA had been conducting a study of mineral resources on Hopi and Navajo lands, including the Black Mesa super formation. Their three-volume report specifically mentioned the idea of “strip-mining and electrical power generation within the foreseeable future.” It was also viewed as a potential oil and gas bonanza.

In 1963, the Supreme Court upheld a decision by a district court that gave the Hopis a clear title to surface and mineral rights for 631,000 acres of land. However, the court also gave both tribes equal rights to minerals and surface rights for 1,785,900 acres – meaning that the tribes would evenly split proceeds from the rich coal deposits on Black Mesa.

For his work on the land dispute case, the new Hopi Council (one that had been bitterly opposed by many in the tribe), paid Boyden $1 million for his work—$780,000 for legal fees and $220,000 as an expression of the Hopi’s “gratitude” for his work. The fee at the time was simply outrageous and was quickly rejected by Arizona BIA officials. In terms of normal costs of the time, for the 7,800 hours spent, the “top price paid for attorneys in the Phoenix area at the time would be worth roughly $273,000. They recommended approval of $400,000. Boyden appealed to Secretary of Interior, Stewart Udall. Udall granted him the $1 million settlement.

Boyden also betrayed the Hopi by failing to allow them to capitalize on the powerful economic level that belonged to them. Black Mesa, while an environmental disaster, was one of the most important political and economic developments in Arizona history.

What is important to understand is that for a generation Arizona politicians had pushed for the adoption of the Central Arizona Project, which would allow Arizona a large share of water from the Colorado River. However, California did not want to lose its share of water. To ease their concerns, a plan was adopted to build a coal-fired power plant in Page, Arizona, and a second plant in Laughlin, Nevada. The coal from Black Mesa would travel through the 273-mile pipeline and the millions of gallons of water used to slurry the coal would help cool the new power plant in Nevada. Without Black Mesa coal, this would never happen, and Boyden did little if anything to help the Hopi.

In 1967, after leasing authority was established, a lease was quickly agreed with Peabody Coal, giving them the right to mine the area. The royalty rates to the tribe were far below commercial rates of the time, which of course made sense because while Boyden was representing the Hopi, he was on the payroll of Peabody Coal!

The power plants were built and the water table in Black Mesa began to drop. Air pollution became chronic. It would take until 1987—21 years after signing the lease—until the Hopi would ever get anywhere near market value for their coal. By then Boyden was dead.

As a footnote, the heavily subsidized Central Arizona Project is today used for heavily subsidized crops. High payments for this use of this water have led to many agricultural districts into bankruptcy and today Arizona is failing to take its full allotment of this wasteful project.

As a result of all of this, tribes no longer use a single attorney for all their legal matters. Animosity between the Hopi and Navajo run high. Such is the legacy of the man, which remains revered in Utah by many, and left a continuing scar on the long tainted history of our relations with Native Americans while pursuing the goals of Manifest Destiny and our relentless push for development in the West.

Resources to check out:
Fire on the Plateau: Conflict and Endurance in the American Southwest by Charles Wilkinson
The Navajo people and Uranium Mining by Doug Brugge and Esther Yazzie-Lewis